A Military Coup

"They Killed Our President – 63 Reasons To Believe There Was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK,” by Jesse Ventura, with Dick Russell and David Wayne, 2014

Ventura, the former independent governor of Minnesota, has moved to the left over the years.  While running, he took no PAC money.  While in office he never met a lobbyist.  He supported a libertarian perspective of legalizing drugs and prostitution, and proclaimed his atheism.  He was a breath of fresh air after the years of fully-corporate politicians, in spite of his economic limitations.

If you have never read a book about the issues surrounding the assassination of John Kennedy, or even if you are familiar with the many discrepancies in the official government white-wash ‘Warren Report,’ this book is still great reading. It is well organized, easy to read and does not drown you in minutiae.  It introduces more information that has come to light over the years from the many books published by analysts, witnesses and involved parties.   This includes recent books about LBJ's role and by Oswald’s girlfriend.  It’s all here and more – the magic bullet, the dead witnesses, the Zapruder film, the fake backyard Oswald photos, the Garrison investigation, the two Oswalds, disappearing records, the fabricated official autopsy, the ignored suspects on the grassy knoll, Oswald’s CIA employment, the last-minute route switch, the 'odd' unprotected presidential limousine, the impossible timing, the disappearing gun, the crappy Italian Carcano rifle and the silencing of the patsy by Jack Ruby. 

Ventura’s collection indicates that leading elements within the CIA, the FBI, the Mob, Texas oilmen, the Dallas Police, the Secret Service and military intelligence, and ultimately LBJ, figure prominently as being responsible for the assassination and the cover-up. Leftists like Noam Chomsky think there can never be a falling-out between an elected capitalist leader and the ‘deep state’ in the U.S.  In this case, the evidence shows it happened.  People like Chomsky seem to think there is a totally homogenous ruling class, which makes it a mystery of why there are two bourgeois parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.  All the evidence points to Kennedy being in direct opposition to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the leadership of the CIA and the FBI over issues like a test ban treaty with the USSR, over invading or bombing Cuba, the failure of the Bay of Pigs, over deepening the involvement in Vietnam, over civil rights.  At one point, he walked out of a meeting in disgust over a military plan, presented by Curtis LeMay, to initiate a first strike against the Soviet Union.  He said at that time, “They all want war.” In 1962, the Joint Chiefs put out a memo, recently declassified, that encouraged ‘shock incidents’ – fake attacks on U.S. soldiers, to form the pretext for an attack on Cuba.  Needless to say, Kennedy did not agree.  Reports indicate Kennedy had to work with Khrushchev to keep a lid on the war mongers in both camps.

At the same time, Kennedy’s brother was jailing the same Mobsters who helped Kennedy win in Illinois.   Kennedy was planning to get rid of the oil depletion allowance, which allowed oil companies to make billions.

The deep state continues no matter what political party is in power.  As Marx pointed out, the state is not neutral, but actually a guardian of the general property relations of the society.  In this case, it is a capitalist state, not something that can be 'turned,' taken over to 'do good,' or where one election or several can change its spots.  This is the social-democratic theory.

These were the motives, ones “Lee Harvey” Oswald never had.  The result, which is why the assassination is still relevant, is that it represented a sort of control coup by the security apparatus and the militarists in the deep-state government, which has lasted to this day.  These people are still in ultimate control, even under Obama.

During this period, the U.S. used assassination teams all over the world, and promoted local death squads.  The attempts on Castro were just part of their efforts.  Those teams and methods were then turned on the Kennedys, on Martin Luther King, on Malcolm X, on Walter Reuther, on the Black Panthers in the 1960s – anyone on the left or liberal-left who was threatening.  Now the methods are somewhat more sophisticated – usually taking down an airplane with an electrical pulse weapon, as was done to Senator Paul Wellstone. 

Detailed by Ventura is the subservient role of nearly all establishment media in supporting the CIA/Government line on the assassination, which continues to this day.  Journalists were not just supportive, they were recruited by the CIA in nearly every major media institution.  The NYT, CBS and Time Inc. were especially close.  For instance, Dan Rather initially lied about what he saw on the Zapruder film.  Tom Brokaw did a hostile interview with Marina Oswald.  In 2013 Charlie Rose scotched a program taped with Robert Kennedy Jr. about the falseness of the Warren Report. The only journalist who did not cooperate, Dorothy Kilgallen, who got a private interview with Ruby in jail, was found dead right before publishing the story.

Most significant of all was the publication by Life magazine of a fake photo of Oswald holding a rifle, with a copy of the Militant and the Worker in his hands.  To anyone on the left who looks at this, it is so obviously a set-up that it is almost laughable.  It is not just the grafted head on the odd leaning body, or the photo disparities, obvious to experts.   

Neither the Socialist Workers Party, who published the Militant, nor the Communist Party, who published the Worker, proclaimed ‘violent’ revolution, and did not carry guns around.  The SWP was inspired by Trotsky and the CP was inspired by bureaucrats like Stalin.  The plot was to blame the assassination on Castro, in order to allow bombing or another invasion. Claiming to be a 'Marxist', then posing for a picture holding a rifle with these two papers was suspect.  Especially since the CP and the SWP hated each other.  It is a pathetically obvious attempt to weld these disparate images together in the eyes of the viewer.  The picture was published by Henry Luce’s Life Magazine.  Luce was a close right-wing  ally of the CIA.

Ventura collects the names of those people seen on the grassy knoll – all mobsters or intelligence people.  J Edgar Hoover announced the name of the shooter within 24 hours without any evidence.  Ventura has great fun with the idea that Oswald, who had ostensibly just shot the president, and then supposedly just shot Officer Tippet, would go into a movie theater to relax. Or that 10 police cars would converge on that same theater over a .60 cent unpaid admission.  General Ed Landsdale, special ops in the military, who worked with the CIA, was identified in Dealey Plaza that day.  He might have been the command and control person responsible for the whole operation.   The Zapruder film was run through a CIA photo lab before being sent to the government.  Many of the people involved in the assassination stayed at the Cabana Motor Hotel, including Ruby.  Thousands of documents are still marked ‘top secret’ and have not been released to the public, 50 years later.  What are they afraid of?

CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, on his deathbed, wrote down the chain of command for the assassination as he understood it:  LBJ, Cord Meyer/Mayer (CIA), David Morales (CIA), Bill Harvey (CIA), French Mafia Gunman from Corsica.

As Richard Nixon said of the Warren Report, “It was the greatest hoax ever to be perpetuated.”  The hoax continues.

Conspiracies

The main ‘argument’ the bourgeois press uses any time someone talks about Kennedy or King or any other conspiracy or possible conspiracy like 9/11 or ‘false flag’ operations – is they call them a ‘conspiracy nut.’  Perhaps you can be a ‘non-conspiracy nut’ too?  Ventura makes the point that believing the official story is actually more nutty than otherwise.  So let’s look at this philosophically.  Is it logically possible that things are done in secret or behind our backs?  Obviously this is true, unless you are completely naïve.  Is it always true that there is a conspiracy anytime something is not to our liking?  That also cannot be true.  Everything cannot be a conspiracy.  Are there no accidents?  Are there not other historical actors? Is everything the government says untrue?  In other words, what distinguishes the two approaches? Not the term 'conspiracy' but facts.  Not just questions, or ‘who benefits,’ but facts.  The extreme right-wing right now alleges everything is a conspiracy.  Some leftists also think everything is a conspiracy. 

It has certainly been historically true that governments regularly conspire fake outrages to justify military action.  The plan for Cuba by the U.S. military was just that.  We have the Reichstag fire, the Tonkin Gulf incident, 9/11 used as an excuse to invade Iraq, and so on.  It was uncovered by Seymour Hirsch that the ‘red line’ gas attack in Syria a year ago alleged by the U.S. government and Britain against Assad were in fact done by someone else.  This was to be the excuse to bomb Syria.  Recently the shadowy al Qaeda-allied “Khorasan Group” in Syria was supposedly operational against U.S. targets, another reason to bomb Syria and Iraq.  This gambit succeeded.  As exposed by Glenn Greenwald, this group turned out not to be operational at all. 

In the assassinations of the ‘60s there is much evidence to show that these were planned by a U.S. government/state under global attack from the left.  The killing of Kennedy was just one of many, in the U.S. and across the globe.

Prior books on this subject: “American Assassination – the Strange Death of Paul Wellstone,” “Secret History of the American Empire,” and “Orders to Kill” on the MLK assassination.  The first two are reviewed below.  Use blog search box, upper left.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog, October 11, 2014